Category: Technology

My favorite apps for taking notes and sense-making from PDF and Kindle

Most of what I read for work these days is in PDF or Kindle format, and there’s an awful lot of it. Trying to make sense out of the ever-faster firehose of information, most of it on subjects that are new to me, has forced me to rethink my research methods, or lack of them. I’ve never been able to take great notes by hand – I’m a much faster typist than hand-writer, and depend on being able to search within my notes, so I’ve mainly concentrated on electronic workflows. 

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Word 2007, 2008: “Insert Section Break” commands grayed out after Endnotes

If you are having trouble inserting a page or section break at the end of a Word document with Endnotes, you have two choices. You could either insert the new section BEFORE the Endnotes area, or change the Endnotes settings to display Endnotes at the end of each section .

Word considers the end of the document to be the one and only end, so nothing can come after it. It is easy to mistake the white space after the last Endnote for normal document space, but it is an “endnote-only” area.

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IIS not recognizing .aspx extension (404 error)

While trying to install a .NET application on a Windows Server 2003 box, I ran into a problem where the .aspx extension was not being recognized. Browsing .NET pages resulted in 404 (“page not found”) errors. Since the same set of application files had been installed on several other servers without incident, it seemed likely that there was something different about this server. The same version of .NET had been installed on all the servers, but never used.

I had assigned .NET 2.0.50727 to the application using the drop-down menu in the Application properties window in IIS Manager. But apparently, sometimes the .NET installer doesn’t register .NET to IIS, and it has to be done manually.

You can tell that this is the problem, if you have assigned .NET to the application, but when looking in IIS Manager > Web Service Extensions, it does not show up in the list.

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The Usability of Windows 8

Just finished reading a fairly devastating review of Windows 8 by Jakob Nielsen. I have to wonder if some of the choices they made in designing the interface were forced because of patent considerations, considering all the air has been sucked out of the room in that regard by Apple.

Worth a read, if you are wondering what to expect of a tablet interface that has been shoehorned onto a PC. Perhaps it will make more sense if they start selling 70″ touch screen high-performance tablet PCs. We’ll all work standing up next to the wall or something, waving our arms. It will be better for our figures, at least.

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.NET Error: httpRuntime requestValidationMode=”2.0″

If you get .NET errors that reference

<system.web>
<httpRuntime requestValidationMode="2.0" />
<!-- everything else -->
</system.web>

It means that the application you are trying to run has set the property requestValidationMode to function the way it acted under .NET 2.0, but this directive only makes any sense under .NET 4.0 or greater, and your website is not set up to use .NET 4.

You need to run the application in a separate application pool and set it to run under .NET 4.0 (which, of course, needs to be installed before it can be used).

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